at OpenHelix

Video Tip of the Week: Visualizing the Galaxy

An antennae galaxy

Well, not that kind of galaxy (though visualizing those are quite nice), this kind of Galaxy. Galaxy is an excellent tool to analyze, reproduce and share genomics data and the Galaxy folks are always updating, improving and adding features to the tool. We have a tutorial for Galaxy to help you get started using this tool. As you might have guessed from the previous sentence, Galaxy is a moving target. The basics (and that’s what the tutorial is for) are the same, but the tutorial is in the process of being updated to reflect some of those changes. That update should be out sooner rather than later, but that said, we just can’t fit everything into the tutorial. The relatively new visualization tool is something that will not be in the tutorial. As there are no tutorials on visualization at the Galaxy site that I can find (if you know of any, link them here!), I’ve included a quick intro to visualizations using Galaxy in this tip of the week.

There are other ways to visualize the data analyzed at Galaxy. Galaxy datasets can often be viewed directly at UCSC Genome Browser, Ensembl, RViewer or in GeneTrack within Galaxy. Those are all excellent tools and powerful ways to view and explore your analysis in depth. In addition, the Galaxy visualization tool is a way to quickly visualize your data to help discovery, direct further analysis and share what you’ve found. It is obviously not a full fledged browser, but is very useful in doing a simple visualization of your data from within Galaxy. Today’s tip gives a quick introduction to Galaxy visualization.

P.S. You might here some bird song in the background. I am in, and working from, Hawaii for the next month (yeah, it’s tough work but someone has got to do it). No way to get those birds (or the frogs at night) to be silent for a bit.